Saturday, November 05, 2016

The death of Professor John Mulvaney on 21
September 2016 placed a full stop on a remarkable career and, in a way, the end of
an era. John Mulvaney was as the first university-trained prehistorian to make Australia his subject
and has been justly described as the ‘Father of Australian Archaeology’.

I met Professor John Mulvaney just once, at
an ANZAAS conference in Canberra.
I remember his infectious smile, the way he cocked his head.

This was a fun conference, a real
experience. I was a nineteen year old university student who had been interested
in Australian prehistory by Isabel McBryde. Isabel had studied under John Mulvaney
at Melbourne
and was one of his protégés.

I had come to the conference almost by
accident because we were staying in Canberra,
allowing me to go. This was an exciting time to be involved in Australian
prehistory. Everything was new, the first drawing back of the veil over the
deep history of Australia’s
Aboriginal peoples.

This was the conference at which Alexander
Gallus presented his results on KoonaldaCave. I remember the
scepticism about those results, the discussion over coffee at the breaks. In
the end, KoonaldaCave would prove to be as
important as Gallus suggested, but that was certainly not clear at the time.

Derek John Mulvaney was born at Yarram, South Gippsland in 1925. One of five children, his Irish
born father was a teacher with the family moving around country Victoria to various
schools and eventually to Frankston.

After completing year 11 at FrankstonHigh School, John became a trainee
teacher but quickly realised that this path was not for him. In 1943, the
eighteen year old joined the RAAF as a navigator. He was sent to Canada for training and then posted to England
in September 1944. 1944. During his days off he toured the English countryside,
creating an interest in history. Apparently, it was his visit to the megalithic
standing stones called ‘the Consuls’ that sparked his particular interest in
prehistory. I was curious, but was not able to identify those particular
standing stones in a short web search.

The War ended before John entered active
service. Late in 1945, he returned to Australia,
enrolling at MelbourneUniversity as an honours
student in history. The course was funded by the Commonwealth Reconstruction
Training Scheme, a scheme that would have a considerable impact on Australian
intellectual life.

At Melbourne,
John studied Roman History under John O’Brian. There were just six in the
class.

In 1949 he was appointed tutor in ancient
history at Melbourne,
enrolling in an MA. Twelve months later he submitted his thesis on ‘State and
Society in Britain
at the time of Roman conquest’.

Reflecting on this early history, I was
struck by the timing of it all. By the time John was 25, he had started as a
trainee teacher, served in the war, completed his first degree, worked as a
tutor and then completed an MA. That’s not bad going! John was always an
organised man!

John’s experiences as well has his study of
ancient Britain
had aroused an interest not just in archaeology, but in the possibilities of
Australian archaeology. He applied for an AustralianNationalUniversity post-graduate
scholarship. His application contained an unusual request: he asked to use the
graduate scholarship to enroll in undergraduate study, in Paleolithic
archaeology, at CambridgeUniversity. Reflecting
the influence of Grahame Clark and his colleagues, Cambridge was one of few university centers
interested in archaeology beyond the Old WorId. It was, John argued, essential
for him to train as an archaeologist and this required undergraduate studies in
prehistory at CambridgeUniversity.

His application was accepted, and in September
1951, full of enthusiasm, John became an undergraduate student at ClareCollege.
Given that he already had two degrees at honours level, he did not have to
complete the first part of the undergraduate course but was allowed to complete
the remaining course over two years.

While John would later be critical of what
he saw as Clarke’s imperial tendencies and indeed of the Cambridge
school as a whole, that period in England was (to use his own words)
a “Golden Age.” Upon arrival, John went to see Grahame Clark who was to be his
first Supervisor. Clarke told him that, in addition to himself, John must go to
a young man named Charles McBurney, who was the real Stone Age authority. John
hadn’t heard of McBurney, but would learn much from him.

The then level of staff student interaction
is hard to imagine today. For his two years at Cambridge, John was supervised every week by
McBurney and also by Clarke until Clarke was appointed professor. Then Clarke’s
place was taken by Glyn Daniel, so throughout his two years, John had contact
every week with two academic supervisors.

Over the two years, John studied stone
tools and took part in his first archaeological digs – in England and Ireland,
Denmark, and in Cyrenaica, Libya.
The Libyan dig was especially important, for it introduced John to the
application of rigorous excavation techniques that he would later use in Australia
and teach to his students, including Isabel McBryde.

Early in 1952, McBurney invited John to
join his party to go to Libya
to dig at the Haua Fteah, the enormous cave where McBurney had dug a trial
trench the previous season. This was clearly an adventure for John. In June
1952, they drove across France
to Marseilles, went by sea to Tunis
and then drove across North Africa to
Apollonia near where the site was located. There was a British army base at
Apollonia. That proved fortunate, for John collected two serious infections,
both requiring hospitalisation at the base hospital.

Archaeology is about precision and
preservation. Charles McBurney had developed techniques to excavate deep sites;
the year John was there they got down to 27 feet. McBurney used sieves
suspended on stands that he developed and he sorted material separately
according to stone, bone, shell, keeping them separate. These were techniques
that we used under Isabel’s guidance sixteen years later, using tweezers to
pick up pieces of bone or charcoal so that they would not be contaminated and could
be properly bagged for later examination by a subject specialist.

John was also exposed to the very early
days of carbon dating, something that would be absolutely critical for him a
little while later in establishing the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation of Australia.

In September following his graduation, John
met and became engaged to Jean Campbell. At this point, John might have stayed
on at Cambridge for a period or, alternatively,
gone to Auckland
as Professor of Archaeology, a move suggested by Clarke. However, while
visiting friends in the north of England there was a car crash that
badly injured Jean and also placed John in hospital. Coming out of hospital, he
found a message from his parents that his father was dying. So the couple abandoned
all other plans and returned to Australia,
marrying after their return.

John was offered a position at MelbourneUniversity teaching Ancient History. He was
now teaching with his former teacher and mentor John O’Brian. Inevitably, his
teaching soon extended to prehistory and archaeology. In 1957, John was allowed
to introduce a fourth-year Honours history option to undergraduates, a course
called Pacific Prehistory. This was the first course taught anywhere in Australia
on the prehistory of our region. So little was known about Australia that Polynesia
was taken as the main field, with Australian material added as the years passed.

In 1956, John began his journey into Australian
prehistory by excavating a limestone rockshelter at Fromm’s Landing on the Murray River, a dig that continued into the early 1960s. Radio
carbon dates from the site, John’s first, suggested that the site had been
occupied for almost 5,000 years. At Fromm’s Landing, John discovered the
skeleton of a dingo, the tooth of a Tasmanian tiger and the highest flood in
the history of the Murray River, all about
3,000 years ago.

John’s Cambridge experience had already convinced him
of the importance of interdisciplinary studies. So at Fromm’s Landing he worked
with geomorphologists. He also took a palynologist, Sadly, no pollen was
discovered in the deposit.

John’s second excavation was also a
limestone rockshelter, this time at Glen Aire on CapeOtway.
This was Isabel McBryde’s first fieldwork experience.

John’s third excavation, at KenniffCave
in Queensland,
began in 1960. In 1962 he received a telegram from his wife, giving him the
first carbon dates from the site. The oldest was 16,000 years. John thought
there must have been a mistake and telegrammed back. The date was indeed 16,000
years. With that one date, the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation of Australia
had been pushed back many thousands of years into the Pleistocene era.

Here we need to reflect on the state of
prehistory globally and especially in Australia at the time.

Globally, the study of prehistory was in
many ways still in its infancy. To a continuing degree, archaeology was
dominated by the romance of the Classical World. In Australia, those few interested in
Australian prehistory had come primarily from museum backgrounds.

In 1960 the University of New England
was the first to appoint a tenured staff member, Isabel McBryde, carrying
prehistory in her job title and was, I think, the first Australian university
to require the study of prehistory as an element in in the introductory history
course. In 1966, UNE was also the first to introduce an Australian prehistory
course at honours level.

I enrolled in History I at UNE in 1963.
Even then, there were very few textbooks. Further, those we had had a
distinctly European flavour. By 1996 when I enrolled in honours, the frontiers
were already being pushed back. Here there were two distinctive features in
Isabel’s archaeological work, both reflecting John Mulvaney’s influence. The
first was a focus on developing a regional cultural sequence, on exploring
Australian prehistory, Aboriginal history, within the confines of a reasonably
broadly defined but still geographically contained region. The second was the
importance placed upon the ethnographic record as a way of examining patterns
of Aboriginal life that might then inform the archaeological record. It was an
exciting time.

In 1965 John was appointed to a position at
the AustralianNationalUniversity
in the Research School of Pacific Studies, allowing him to work full-time for
the first time as a research worker in the Australian region.

At ANU, John became increasingly involved
with Jim Bowler (a geomorphologist from MelbourneUniversity)
and Rhys Jones (an ANU prehistorian newly appointed by Jack Golson.

In 1969, Jim Bowler persuaded John and Rhys
Jones to take part in a field trip to LakeMungo, in western NSW, one of the
dry-lake beds in the WillandraLakes complex, surveyed
and named previously by Bowler. This visit set in train the most important
archaeological discoveries in Australia,
or perhaps anywhere in the world, to that time. The first samples of charcoal
and burnt bones included material dated to 26,000 years before the present, the
earliest evidence for human cremation. Another burial site located by Jim
Bowler was an inhumation, ritually covered with red ochre, was older still. These
were the most remote Paleolithic remains of Homo sapiens discovered to that
point, placing Australian Aborigines at the very end, in time and place, of the
human diaspora out of Africa. In 1981, John
had the honour of introducing the nomination of the WillandraLakes
as a world heritage site, at a World Heritage Committee meeting.

In the midst of his other work, John found
time to complete and publish The
Prehistory of Australia in 1969. This book has now seen three editions (the
most recent with Jo Kamminga as co-author in 1999 involved a total revision)
and remains a classic.

In 1971 John was appointed to the
Foundation Chair in Prehistory in the Arts Faculty at the ANU and in the
following year introduced Prehistory 1 as an undergraduate subject. In addition
to a busy archaeological life life, he became involved almost inevitably in
related public activities.

In the 1960s, John along with Jack Golson
and Isabel MvBryde campaigned for legislation to protect Aboriginal sites,
including organising a major conference on the requirements for site
legislation. Between 1965 and 1975, every state in Australia introduced some kind of
legislation to protect Aboriginal sites. He was involved in the formation of
the Australian (now Australian and Torres Strait Islander) Institute of Aboriginal
Studies, being an executive member between 1964-80
and then its chair in 1982-84. He was also involved in organising the first
meeting of the Australian Archaeological Association.

John became a leading light in bridging the
gap between the public and academia, actively campaigning on pubic issues,
including the struggle to save the FranklinRiver and its Aboriginal
heritage. He became a foundation member of the Australian Heritage Commission
in 1976, remaining a member until 1982, and member of the Committee of Inquiry
on Museums and National Collections 1974-75, the body which recommended
establishment of the NationalMuseum of Australia. It would be 20 years
before this recommendation would be acted on and even then its details were
largely ignored. John was also involved in the formulation of the Burra Charter
(1979) and was the chief Australian delegate to the inaugural UNESCO meeting in
Paris, held to
determine the criteria for World Heritage listing. He was instrumental in
nominating the WillandraLakes and KakaduNational Park to the
World Heritage list. latter

John’s role as a public intellectual during
his long career has been detailed in the book Prehistory to Politics. John Mulvaney, the Humanities and the Public
Intellectual edited by Tim Bonahady and Tom Griffiths (Melbourne University
Press 1996).

In the late 1970s, the ANU decided to
include anthropology alongside prehistory in John’s Department. High student
interest led to the appointment of another professor. Differences in approach created
difficulties for John. Partly for that
reason, partly to open his post to a younger prehistorian, he decided to ease
into an early ‘retirement’ in 1985 aged 60, being inscribed as Professor
Emeritus at ANU the following year.

‘Retirement’ is in inverted commas since
John remained as active as ever. He became Honorary Secretary of the AustralianAcademy of the Humanities, and Chair of
the ACT Heritage Committee, while the following two decades became a golden age
of writing and publishing. During this period John wrote, coauthored or edited
16 books, including his autobiography.

Over his long career, John received many
awards including .a CMG (Companion in The Most Distinguished Order of St.
Michael and St. George) in 1982, an Order of Australia (Australia’s highest Order) in 1991, the Graham
Clark Medal by the BritishAcademy in 1999 and the Rhys
Jones Medal from the Australian Archaeological Association in 2004.

Reflecting on the changes that had taken
place over his long professional and public career, John suspected in 2000 that
that there might not be another general prehistory of Australia. So
much had been discovered that it was very difficult now to cover it in one book
within the space limits set by publishers. Instead, it would now be possible
and indeed more sensible to write specific regional histories. In a sense, that
was almost a reversion to the position he had held in the 1960s on the need to
develop regional cultural sequences instead of trying to create generic
sequences that may or may not hold in individual areas.

He also mused on the changes that had taken
place in the disciplines of archaeology and prehistory, at the way
multi-disciplinary science had pushed out the boundaries of what could be
learned. They have indeed been truly remarkable. This links to another element
in John’s various reflections.

When he first became interested in
Australian prehistory and indeed for many years after, he had not met any
Aboriginal people. He was 35 before he saw his first Aboriginal people on his
first trip to KenniffCave in 1960 and then met many after he started field
work in the Northern Territory
from 1963 on. He was not aware of the extent of continuing knowledge among
Aboriginal people. He was alerted to this partly by the anthropological
studies, partly through increasing contact. In 2000, he said: “I suppose in my
own career I went from this ‘I was a Stone Age archaeologist, I wasn’t dealing
with the living’ till I started meeting living people and giving greater and
greater credit to work of Donald Thomson (Australian anthropologist), work like
that.”

I could identify with that. While I was
doing my honours thesis on the economic structure of Aboriginal life in Northern New South Wales at the time of European
intrusion,I read Malcolm
Calley's PhD thesis on Bandjalang Social Organisation with fascination. My thesis was a study in ethnohistory,
using historical records to try to understand the economic structure of
aboriginal life. At the time I was writing there was great suspicion among
historians about the role of oral history and tradition as an evidence source.
There was also a view that the Aborigines of Eastern Australia were too far
removed from their tribal past for current memories to be a valid guide to
traditional life. To me, the striking thing about Malcolm's thesis was the way
it demonstrated that oral tradition was still in fact worthy of study as a way
of understanding present and past Aboriginal life.

John became involved not just in the study
of the Aboriginal past but in giving Aboriginal access to that past, in involving
them, recognising their continuing history and contribution. Among other
things, he played an important role in the transformation of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies into an Indigenous controlled institution, as well as campaigning for
protection of indigenous sites.

By 1999, John was worried about balance,
concerned that the pendulum had swung to the point that policies and processes
were actively impeding the study of Aboriginal history. The consent
requirements for digs, for example, imposed financial and time costs on honours
or higher degree students that many students could not afford, reducing the
numbers of those interested in Aboriginal history. As another example, the
reburial of remains has the effect of destroying their archaeological value,
including the possibility of using new scientific techniques to extend our
knowledge.

Perhaps ironically, the work that John and
others did to protect Aboriginal sites has led to an explosion in certain
aspects of Australian archaeology and especially the need to carry out
investigations in advance of development activities. This has created jobs for
John’s students. I say ironically because so much Australian archaeology is now
carried out on a fee for service basis without peer review or indeed the
results being easily available. Meantime, and I find this sad, Australian
prehistory seems to have dropped behind studies elsewhere. I still remember my
astonishment at visiting the DanishNationalMuseum
last year at just how much was now known about Danish prehistory as compared to
Australian. .

In 2004, Jean Mulvaney died after heart
surgery. She was 81, a little older than John. They had brought up six children
in the home in Yarralumla which John and Jean established when they moved to
ANU from Melbourne.
Because my focus was on John, I haven’t said much about Jean. She was clearly a
remarkable person in her own right, you will find details given under sources
below, and the couple formed a very real partnership.

In 2006 John married again, historian Liz
Morrison. John and Liz continued to live in the Yarralumla home John and Jean
had established. John continued his work until his death plus the gardening that had been his primary
leisure activity..

Keep Belshaw writing

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Blog Objectives - and a warning to readers

This blog aims to consolidate and extend New England historical material originally carried on the main New England Australia site. With time, I hope that it will develop into a living history of New England.

Readers should be warned, however, that the original posts are work in progress. This means that ealier posts may have been overtaken by later research or thought. I have to go through and do some updates and cross-links, but this is a slow process.